Smart Alec

Too Big to Fail

Comedic genius of 30 Rock, seductive star of It’s Complicated, co-host of this year’s Academy Awards–Alec Baldwin has come through personal and professional disaster to emerge as Hollywood’s favorite rogue. How come he’s threatening to retire?

How did Alec Baldwin achieve this bizarre headlock on our affections? It’s as if he secretly adopted us, or we adopted him; either way, say hello to your new daddy. Open any door and there he is, welcoming himself in. Unfold the Arts & Leisure section of The New York Times and behold a front-page article about Baldwin’s new role as the official announcer of the New York Philharmonic’s radio concert series. (“Asked about his favorite performances, he rattled them off: ‘The Solti Mahler Ninth. Any Copland with Slatkin when he was in St. Louis. I like the Mahler cycle that Tilson Thomas did.’ ”) Flip to the gossip pages of the New York Daily News and there’s an item about his donating a million dollars to New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts to establish a scholarship fund. Check in at Gawker and there’s a photo of Baldwin with NY1 news anchor Pat Kiernan under the unsarcastic headline new york’s two favorite people, together at last. Turn on cable’s Turner Classic Movies and he’s jawing about his favorite celluloids with host Robert Osborne. And he will co-host this year’s Academy Awards presentation with Steve Martin, one of his co-stars in Nancy Meyers’s romantic comedy It’s Complicated. As this is being written, word is percolating through the movie blogs that he may even notch a best-actor-in-a-supporting-role nomination for It’s Complicated, which would really be the cherry on top.

A veteran combatant in the fine art of acrimony, the bruised mascot for the male midlife crisis, Baldwin has managed to entice everybody into his corner without going soft or sweet, abjuring the dreaded Robin Williams crinkle-­twinkle. Near­ly every­body enjoys Baldwin now, even if he often doesn’t seem to enjoy himself that much, his lacerating honesty never entirely insulated from self-loathing. Changing lanes as an actor from daytime soaps (The Doctors) to nighttime soaps (Knots Landing, where he and William Devane competed for the blue-ribbon title of smoked ham) to feature films (everything from Beetlejuiceto Working Girl) to the Broadway stage (nominated for a Tony for his Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire) to prime-time sitcoms, Baldwin has racked up a lot of rough mileage in the rearview mirror, his track record and rap sheet cratered with potholes, implosions, intemperate outbursts, and contrite apologies. To name but a few, otherwise we’ll be here all semester: the disastrous publicity that attended the making of The Marrying Man, where Baldwin was romantically paired with his future wife, Kim Basinger, in a failed comedy that spun out of control and landed in poison ivy; his kissing off the Jack Ryan franchise after The Hunt for Red October, a decision greeted as a nearsighted act of career hari-kari; the bitter divorce from Basinger and the even uglier leaked phone message left for his then 11-year-old daughter, Ireland, in which he excoriated her as a “rude, thoughtless little pig” and her mother as “a thoughtless pain in the ass,” the public outcry driving him to thoughts of suicide; the uproar after he proposed the stoning of Representative Henry Hyde for his role in the impeachment of President Clinton; the political skirmishes with Fox News, which reached their merry peak with his calling host Sean Hannity “a no-talent whore”; and his long-running feud with “Page Six” of the New York Post, which nicknamed him “The Bloviator” and used to bat him around like a pi&ntildeata on the slightest pretense until détente was reached in 2006.

Consider, too, the acute cabin pressure closer to home. Raised on Long Island, the oldest brother in an acting brood that was once considered Hollywood’s hunkiest gene pool, he has seen two of his brothers flake out. Daniel Baldwin, best known for lumbering as a detective through TV’s Homicide, has ridden the down escalator of drugs and arrests, not even able to stick it out for a full season of Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew. Stephen Baldwin, whose claim-to-movie-fame moment was as the sniper in The Usual Suspects—where, before picking off the enemy, he wisecracked, “Oswald was a fag”—forsook Hollywood depravity to re-invent himself as a Christian-­fundamentalist anti-porn missionary and reality-TV performer, to little avail. (Over $2 million in debt, he declared bankruptcy in 2009.) And yet, for everything that’s happened to him and around him, Alec Baldwin shows not the pitted surface of a battered survivor but the smooth finish of a Beloved Entertainer. When I read the news that Michael Douglas was being cast to play Liberace in a biopic directed by Steven Soderbergh, my reaction was “But it’s Baldwin who belongs in front of the candelabra!” He’s got the spark of lunacy vitally required.

Baldwin’s career can be unevenly split into its Young Elvis and Old Elvis phases. In his Young Elvis punkdom, Baldwin is lean, lippy, moist, quick on the draw with a hair comb, and arrogantly princely, but tender underneath: a cocky brooder. Unlike those Method-y actors who are so recessive that they handle each line of dialogue as if it might be their last crust of bread, preferring to be terse and understated, Baldwin proves himself mesmerizingly capable of homering big, smacking, rhetorical set pieces—monologues that he nails to the wall like manifestos: the testimony in Malice, where, playing a brilliant surgeon being sued for malpractice, he lets the inquiry panel have it full blast (“You ask me if I have a ‘God complex.’ Let me tell you something: I am God”); the kickoff speech in the screen adaptation of David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross, which may be the most damnatious anti–pep talk ever and ends with Baldwin holding up a pair of brass balls, in case the salesmen didn’t quite get the message. Some male stars who exude musky presence and menace when they’re young gunslingers, full of Brando and bravado, can turn into a steaming cup of coffee as they age (Harvey Keitel), acquire an armadillo shell (Mickey Rourke), or become an empty bag of tricks (Nicolas Cage). In Old Elvis middle age (old as in older, not old old), Baldwin may be thicker and rounder, his neck and shirt collar battling for supremacy, and those once smoldering stares squinching up into darting, wary calculation, but he has escaped the menopausal curse of Old Elvis, outwitting the artistic bankruptcy of repetitive slog and the resultant loss of pride and morale that bedeviled the original Elvis at Graceland (stewing in a pot of self-pity). In his biographical encyclopedia of film, critic David Thomson unflatteringly compared Baldwin’s portrayal of bank robber Doc McCoy in the remake of The Getaway with Steve McQueen’s in the Sam Peckinpah original, and posed the question “Baldwin is evidently smart—I wonder if he isn’t better suited to comedy?”

He was, he is, and he was smart enough to realize it and capitalize, first in a series of guest-host appearances on Saturday Night Live (including the classic “Schweddy Balls” routine), then on Will & Grace (“Grace, you know something, and you’re going to tell me. I am skilled in many forms of interrogation, including physical torture, sleep deprivation, and Jewish guilt”), and now on 30 Rock, where he swashbuckles through media-executive intrigue and sexual banter with Dadaist aplomb, the put-on artist as kinky patriarch. (Ted Danson has something of the same goof going as the magazine editor always avid for rascal adventure on HBO’s comedy series Bored to Death.) Baldwin plays rogue operatives with so many hidden compartments that even they seem unprepared for the jack-in-the-box surprises that pop out of them under duress. They’re so deep into intrigue that their identity is in flux, a series of impersonations with Camp intonations. The speedy dexterity with which Baldwin’s Jack Donaghy embroiders bizarre conceits on 30 Rock is the stuff of foppish, Restoration comedy, if Restoration comedy came out of a cocktail shaker. Even in blocky repose, using his hands with dainty finesse and making kissy lips as he plays crafty mind games with a never-ending ammo clip of non sequiturs and off-the-wall observations (“I know this sounds ugly, but with Manhattan real estate there are no rules. It’s like check-in at an Italian airport”), Baldwin projects potent energy in reserve, the power to tear somebody in two as if they were a croissant. Burly, hirsute, and self-parodyingly butch, Baldwin has carved out his own wild kingdom of macho-effeminate; in gay parlance, he’s a straight “bear,” a chewy chunk of beefsteak. Lying in bed next to Meryl Streep in It’s Complicated, luxuriating under his thick carpeting of chest fur, he looks as if he’d scooped the honeypot clean. (He gets one of the biggest laughs in the movie when he postcoitally palms Streep’s crotch and muses, “Home, sweet home.”)

To us civilians, Baldwin has never been sharper as a performer, so assured that everything he does looks etched in air, yet he recently gave an interview in which he pronounced his film career “a complete failure” and announced plans to retire after 30 Rock. To some, it sounded like griping ingratitude, but he has a deeper perspective than bystanders do. As harsh on himself as Baldwin is known for being, this droopy collar of unfulfillment shouldn’t be chalked up solely to masochistic self-pity or excessive modesty. Despite those barn burners in Malice and Glengarry Glen Ross and leaving scorch marks through lesser-known films such as Miami Blues, The Juror, The Cooler, and Running with Scissors, Baldwin hasn’t starred in a movie that’s bannered itself on film history as iconic, canonical. Jack Nicholson can pat his stomach and coast for the rest of his career and still have the nonconformist pianist in Five Easy Pieces, McMurphy in One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Jake Gittes in Chinatown, and the colonel in A Few Good Men (“You can’t handle the truth!”) on his eternal résumé. Al Pacino may have succumbed to hoarse self-caricature, but he still has Michael Corleone sitting in the infernal dark in The Godfather, the hippie cop in Serpico, as well as Dog Day Afternoon, Scarface, and Vince in Heat, not to mention the blind retired officer in Scent of a Woman with his trademark “Hoo-ha!” Tom Hanks: Forrest Gump, Apollo 13, Saving Private Ryan, the voice of Woody in Toy Story. Baldwin can hold his own with anyone on-screen, but he doesn’t have that one defining movie and one defining role that fit together like sword and scabbard. He also has a restless intelligence, as evidenced not only by his interviews but also by the book he did with Mark Tabb, A Promise to Ourselves, about fatherhood, divorce, and family law (one of the few celebrity-spawned books with gravitas)—a nervous energy and catholic range of interests which make it harder for him to cool his loafers for hours waiting for the crew to light the freaking set. So perhaps the smoke signals he’s sending up about retiring aren’t a bluff. But I can’t help but think that if he gets the chance to work with Meryl Streep again he won’t say no. That would be like turning down dessert, and he’s a cat who can’t resist cream.